Sheryl Sandberg’s “Option B” and the Facebook Way to Grieve

Sheryl Sandberg explains how her husband’s death taught her to appreciate Facebook’s role in “helping people share.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY

“In my personal life I am not somebody who embraces uncertainty. I like things to be in order,” Sheryl Sandberg, the C.O.O. of Facebook, wrote in her 2013 best-seller, “Lean In.” In that book, which grew out of a phenomenally popular TED talk—it has been viewed more than seven million times since 2010—Sandberg urged women to nurture the ambition to rise to the top of their professions. She also laid out some beguilingly practical-seeming injunctions for how that kind of success might be achieved. These included “Sit at the table”—literally, in the conference room, as well as metaphorically, in life—and “Don’t leave before you leave,” by which she meant that women should refrain from modifying their career goals in anticipation of motherhood, and, instead, embrace—“lean in” to—opportunity. Sandberg’s TED talk, even more explicitly than her book, posited the revolutionary potential of women’s empowerment at the highest levels: of a hundred and eighty heads of state, she noted, only nine were women. “I think a world . . . where half of our countries, and half of our companies, were run by women, would be a better world,” she said.

Another maxim, “Make your partner a real partner,” was prominent among Sandberg’s pieces of advice. “When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is to date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them,” she wrote. “I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is.” By way of illustration, she shared examples from her own marriage, to Dave Goldberg, the C.E.O. of SurveyMonkey. In her pages, Goldberg was a menschy sort who followed her to Silicon Valley and did his fair share of school-pickup runs. “We need more men to sit at the table . . . the kitchen table,” Sandberg quipped. A little more than two years after Sandberg’s manifesto was published, Goldberg died, at the age of forty-seven, having fallen from a treadmill while exercising at a resort’s gym in Mexico, where he and Sandberg were on vacation. (An autopsy revealed that Goldberg suffered from an undiagnosed cardiac arrhythmia.) Unbidden, uncertainty embraced Sandberg, and, in her second book, “Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy,” she writes about the event and its aftermath.

While “Lean In” grew out of a motivational speech, “Option B” arose from a public confessional: a letter that Sandberg posted to her followers on Facebook thirty days after Goldberg’s death, having completed a key period of mourning in the Jewish tradition. As readers of “Lean In” would have been aware, Sandberg was the kind of person to whom nothing bad had ever really happened, aside from a brief early marriage that could later be reckoned as a worthwhile learning experience, with no enduring cost attached. In the letter, Sandberg confessed her own prior insulation from tragedy: “I have learned that I never really knew what to say to others in need,” she wrote. She concluded with an anecdote that gave the new book its title: when Sandberg wept over the fact that Goldberg was no longer available for a particular parent-child activity, a male friend offered the following: “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.”

Kicking the shit out of things is Silicon Valley’s preferred mode of operation, and the rhetoric of productive violence peppers the tech industry’s vernacular. As Sandberg reminds her readers, when she arrived at the Facebook offices in the company’s early days, the walls were plastered with posters that read, “Move fast and break things.” In “Option B,” Sandberg attempts to kick the shit out of grief, both for herself and her children. (It is co-authored with Adam Grant, a professor of psychology at Wharton.) While surely not the sequel Sandberg or her publishers hoped for, “Option B” has arrived at the top of best-seller lists, praised in reviews for its rawness, honesty, and generosity. “Lean in? I could barely stand up,” Sandberg writes at one point, with winning candor. Like her début volume, “Option B” is an optimistic book, even if one riven with sorrow. She argues that after adversity and loss, there is an opportunity for “post-traumatic growth.” “A brush with death can lead to a new life,” Sandberg writes, while acknowledging in the next breath, “It’s not an easy pivot.”

Thus the book is in part a moving memoir, in which she describes in harrowing detail her discovery of her husband on the floor of the gym—the last thing they did together, earlier that afternoon, was play Settlers of Catan on their iPads—and quotes from the diary she wrote between Goldberg’s death and what would have been his forty-eighth birthday. His grave, she writes, “looked so much smaller than it loomed in my memory from the day we buried him.” But it is also a chronicle of Sandberg’s efforts to wrest certainty back from uncertainty. It shows her in the face of tragedy behaving like the data-driven A-student type she acknowledges herself to be: seeking out the supporting studies and statistics that show how best she might serve her kids in order for them survive, and even thrive, in the context of their mutilated family unit. It offers readers aspirational bereavement: ideas on taking, as Davey Alba wrote in Wired, to “the hacker way through grief.”

Sandberg seeks solace in the research of Martin Seligman, the celebrated psychologist, who has characterized the “three ‘P’s,” habits of mind that hinder recovery after trauma or tragedy. (They are personalization, or blaming oneself; pervasiveness, or the belief that every aspect of life is altered; and permanence, the conviction that nothing will ever get better.) She follows the advice of Rabbi Nat Ezray, who performed her husband’s funeral and recommends that she “lean in to the suck.” She is at first horrified, and then galvanized, by the venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, a friend and former Facebook colleague, who urges her to make sure that she is still pushing herself at work, admonishing her to “get back on the motherf***ing path.”

Sandberg seeks, sometimes strenuously, to connect her experience to that of others who have experienced trauma, finding emotional kinship with acquaintances like Kevin Krim, an executive at CNBC, whose young son and daughter were killed by their nanny, and who has gone on, with his wife, to found a not-for-profit organization in their name. She also identifies with the experience of strangers well beyond her social circle, like the survivors of the massacre perpetrated by Dylann Roof at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and a refugee whom she interviews after learning about the woman’s loss of her sixteen-year old son and two-year-old grandson in Syria’s civil war. The woman, identified only by her first name, Wafaa, tells Sandberg of the comfort she finds in cooking, in caring for her other children, and in God, all of which Sandberg translates, rather loosely, into “taking back joy.”

Sandberg, who is reportedly worth more than a billion and a half dollars, is quick to acknowledge the ways in which she is insulated from the economic insecurity felt by so many others after loss. As in “Lean In,” where she recounted a funny-not-funny anecdote about discovering that her daughter had head lice while flying to a conference on eBay’s corporate jet, some of the stories of family life in “Option B” have a head-turning quality, such as the occasion when, to mitigate the awfulness of marking their first year without their father, she takes her kids to the headquarters of SpaceX to witness a launch. After three failed attempts, this one is a success; Sandberg draws a lesson about corporate as well as personal resilience.

For her own part, Sandberg writes, Goldberg’s death made her work and career seem more meaningful to her, not less: “I connected with the Facebook mission of helping people share in a way that I never had before.” She describes the ways in which Facebook provides a venue in which friends and strangers alike can express their sympathy for the recently bereaved or celebrate the virtues of the recently departed. “I did not truly understand how important Facebook could be to those suffering from loss until I experienced it myself,” she writes of the outpouring of fond and grateful stories posted to Goldberg’s Facebook profile after his funeral.

“Helping people share” is certainly one way of describing what Facebook does, at the platform’s most benign and useful; judging by the volume of death notices—of parents, partners, siblings, pets—that may flow into a user’s News Feed, many users other than Sandberg have found comfort in this most public way of conveying personal sorrow. But, as Sandberg’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledged in a long letter he published in February, there are far less comforting consequences of Facebook’s much vaunted connectivity. By permitting the proliferation of propaganda and lies during last year’s Presidential campaign, and by insulating users within their own ideological communities, Facebook was, at the very least, complicit in insuring that Sandberg’s count of female heads of state did not increase by one. “For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter, conveying a sense of responsibility, if not culpability. “Our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community—for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion for all.” Given that Facebook has failed to do those things, Sandberg’s vision in “Option B” of Facebook as a platform for the expression of empathy rings somewhat hollow.

Perhaps that is inevitable, given that Facebook, like any business, is driven by numbers, and that its success as a business depends upon algorithms substituting for the kind of human judgment that motivates a friend, a family member, or a rabbi to care for another. Early in the book, Sandberg writes of several occasions not long after Goldberg’s death when she broke down, or nearly broke down, in tears during meetings, before hastily excusing herself from the room. “Not exactly the kind of disruption Silicon Valley is looking for,” she writes. It’s a neat line, but also a sad truth. Is kicking the shit out of things even compatible with showing compassion? That is, as Sandberg and her colleagues might put it, a tough pivot.